The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services.
Such a spacecraft includes a telemetry and command (T&C) subsystem that enables a ground station to command the spacecraft, monitor performance and health of the spacecraft (“T&C functionality”). The T&C subsystem may also provide a ranging capability, by which the spacecraft's distance (range) with respect to a ground station may be determined, and may also be referred to as a telemetry command and ranging (TC&R) subsystem.
The T&C subsystem equipment will normally be provided with at least 2:1 redundancy and the spacecraft can therefore tolerate, with no degradation in performance, a failure of at least a single component within the T&C subsystem. Nevertheless, because a second failure in the T&C subsystem may result in complete loss of the entire spacecraft, techniques for mitigating impacts of component failures are desirable. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,501, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, and hereby incorporated into the present disclosure in its entirety for all purposes, describes techniques for mitigating impacts of failures within a T&C subsystem. In addition, issues in the T&C subsystem such as design or implementation issues, requirement changes, mission evolution, frequency allocation changes, etc, and new techniques may make it desirable to decommission one or more of the T&C subsystem components or to enhance certain features of T&C subsystem components.